Nasa’s space shuttle programme, launched in the early 1980s, aimed to make space flight more routine using reusable vehicles. It was a Cold War show of strength. Nasa was under pressure to launch often and succeed publicly, proving the US’s technological edge over the Soviet Union. There was also a push to diversify. For the first time, women and minorities were being brought into a space programme that had long been reserved for white male fighter pilots.
In 1983, Sally Ride became the first American woman in space. Just three years later, the dangers of the programme were laid bare when Challenger exploded shortly after launch, killing all seven crew members. The disaster exposed major flaws in Nasa’s safety culture and the human cost of political pressure.
This is the backdrop for Taylor Jenkins Reid’s unputdownable ninth novel, Atmosphere. Known for best-sellers such as Daisy Jones & The Six and The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, Reid shifts direction with Atmosphere, though the novel is less about the mechanics of space flight and more about the pressures faced by its characters.
It’s what Reid called a “coming-of-age novel” for herself as well as her protagonist. In interviews, she’s spoken about how the book changed her, and how the research into shuttle missions and the lives of female astronauts forced her to think differently about ambition and courage.
Her space odyssey centres on Joan Goodwin, a fiercely intelligent woman who has always been obsessed with the stars: “To look up at the night-time sky is to become a part of a long line of people throughout human history who looked above at that same set of stars,” Joan believes. “It is to witness time unfolding.”
Like Sally Ride, also a physicist and astronomy professor, Joan applies for and is selected in 1980 as part of the first Nasa cohort to include women. The novel’s emotional climax echoes the Challenger disaster, though Reid takes care not to fictionalise the actual event.
The story moves between Joan’s early years at Nasa and a mission in 1984 that goes badly wrong. Joan’s decision to join Nasa creates immediate tension with her family. Her sister Barbara has depended on Joan for financial support and help raising her perceptive young daughter, Frances. When Joan leaves for Houston, she steps away from those responsibilities and her relationship with the unlikeable Barbara starts to break down. But her connection to Frances deepens. Through letters and rare visits, Joan develops a tender, loving relationship with the neglected 10-year-old.
“Joan is driven by the awe she has, not only for the universe itself and our particular solar system, but also the fact that our study of those things is our pursuit of understanding ourselves. That by trying to understand the universe, we’re trying to understand our place in it and where we come from and where we may be going,” Reid said. “Once you start asking those questions, it becomes more difficult to take any of it for granted.”
As one of the few women in the training group, Joan’s presence is often met with resistance. She’s scrutinised for how well she fits in, whether she causes problems and how closely she adheres to expectations; she’s passed over for assignments, left out of informal networks and given vague warnings about team dynamics.
Reid includes just enough technical detail to ground the story, without slowing it down. The writing is measured, the pacing deliberate. Emotional tension builds gradually and is driven by small choices rather than big plot twists. “Look what we humans had done,” she writes in one chapter. “We had looked at the world around us — the dirt under our feet, the stars in the sky, the speed of a feather falling from the top of a building — and we had taught ourselves to fly.”
She began her research for the book with Shuttle, Houston, the memoir by Nasa’s longest-serving flight director, Paul Dye. After reading it, she reached out to Dye directly. He became a key adviser throughout the process, and his support was so valuable that Reid dedicated the book to him. As she put it, “nobody is going to make it to space alone”.
The book looks at what it takes to succeed in a system not built to accommodate difference. Reid wanted to explore how intimate a connection could be between one character in space and one on the ground, and that those characters would both be women. Among Joan’s fellow trainees is Vanessa Ford, an engineer who becomes both a confidante and a lover. Their relationship remains secret — in 1980s’ Nasa being open about being a lesbian would end both their careers. But that’s where the novel finds its weight.
In her evocative foreword, Reid writes of the immovable starts in the night sky: “We can succeed or fail, get it right or get it wrong, love and lose the ones we love, and still the Summer Triangle will point south. And in that way, I know everything will be some type of okay — as impossible as that can seem sometimes.”
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